It is a sign of who’s in and who’s out in academia that psychology Prof. Barry Beyerstein, who has devoted his career to debunking claims of paranormal phenomena, is the one who teaches it at Simon Fraser University.

This isn’t exactly evil, but it’s disconcerting — because Beyerstein was instrumental in refusing the same chance to an SFU psychologist who is open to the possibility that extra-sensory perception, near-death experiences and clairvoyance (“psi” phenomena) are real.

“Parapsychology is not accepted in academic circles,” understates Beyerstein, an outgoing, oft-quoted activist with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, whose raison d’etre is captured in its pistol-packing acronym: CSICOP.

Years ago Beyerstein helped block Prof. Robert Harper, former chair of SFU’s communications department, from teaching a course about parapsychology; Beyerstein feared Harper’s approach would be too “one-sided.”

In Beyerstein’s current course, he says students can argue against him in support of paranormal phenomenon, but they usually get low marks because they do a “poor” job of it.

They do things, he says, like suggest he’s biased.

Which seems obvious.

Pressed on whether he might be as “one-sided” as he believes Harper is, Beyerstein acknowledged he does have a bias — but only toward “empiricism” (which the Oxford Dictionary says is the “theory that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience.”)

Beyerstein typifies today’s psychological status quo. A survey of 1,100 North American professors, which asked whether they believed ESP was a likely possibility, found only 34 per cent of psychologists agreed, compared to 55 per cent of natural scientists and 77 per cent of those in the humanities.

Beyerstein mentions frequently that Harper has held a grudge against him for a long time for banning his course. But Beyerstein plays down his role, claiming he thought Harper could possibly have taught it with prerequisites. He was just overruled by his review team.

However, Harper, a 72-year-old widower living in West Vancouver, seems to have transcended past frustration. He was not initially eager to talk about his decades’-old battle with SFU.

A wiry man with a shock of silver hair, a father of four sons (one of whom died in a car crash), an SFU professor emeritus, Harper is writing a book, counselling troubled teenagers, golfing and starting up a centre for the arts on Bowen Island.

With a fighter’s wry smile, however, Harper recounts how he did an end run on the university after Beyerstein and company killed his course. He gained approval to teach “Altered States of Consciousness.”

In it, he taught students how to dissect evidence for and against ESP (such as sensing that a loved one in another city has died), psychokinesis (moving a matchstick, say, without using one’s body), life after death (including messages from mediums), reincarnation and near-death experiences.

When the wily Scot took mandatory retirement in the early 1990s, more than 200 students were on a waiting list for the course.

Harper says the field of parapsychology is dominated by two kinds of people: “pathological believers, and pathological skeptics.” He says he is neither.

On one hand, he says he knows much more than Beyerstein about the fakery that charlatans and true believers pass off as bone fide psychic phenomena.

But since he also advocates academic freedom, and gave up on his earlier humanistic atheism to think of himself as a non-institutional Christian (who’s convinced the church is “bureaucratized spirituality”), he’s fascinated by rigorous research into the paranormal at elite institutions such as the University of Edinburgh and Princeton.

Harper has joined experiments at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. One revealed people’s thoughts could affect the outcome of tens of thousands of coin flips. Although the effect was “very weak,” Harper says it was statistically unmistakable.

Harper also took part in a ganzfeld (“whole field”) experiment at Princeton, in which he had visions of jets, waves and Michelangelo’s statue of David while in isolation. His dreamlike images turned out to parallel a movie another subject had been watching in another chamber, which strongly suggested the men’s minds communicated at a distance.

CSICOP, he says, has ignored such studies.

Empiricism, says Harper, is an important scientific approach that has advanced human understanding. But it has been over-applied. People such as Beyerstein, he says, don’t recognize that doctrinaire empiricism can be reductionistic, and inadequate for dealing with subjective things such as imagination, emotion and clairvoyance.

In his book, Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality (SUNY Press), noted philosopher David Ray Griffin says sophisticated research into the paranormal, particularly repeatable ganzfeld experiments, has blossomed in the past decade — leading to serious consideration in some quarters, including Rita Atkinson’s respected textbook, Introduction to Psychology.

Griffin says the problem with CSICOP, whose official publication is called The Skeptical Inquirer, is it does not engage in open-minded scientific investigation, but “acts as thought police, blowing the whistle for all claims of psi.” True skeptics, Griffin says, would doubt all ideas, especially those that are dominant.

While Beyerstein says he rejects parapsychology because, if true, it would radically change the orthodox understanding of science, Harper and Griffin say that’s exactly the point: Science needs to move beyond its mechanistic model to one that recognizes we are in a living, intelligent universe — where the paranormal may just be “normal.”

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